BroadVision Partners with SugarCRM, Connecting Social Business and CRM Platforms

Enterprise social networking provider BroadVision is adding a little sugar to its solutions -- SugarCRM, to be exact. This week, the two companies announced an integration between BroadVision’s Clearvale collaboration solution and SugarCRM’s cloud platform.

The Clearvale engagement platform connects groups across departments, allowing them to collaborate on projects that can now use the data, charts and reports in SugarCRM. Similarly, SugarCRM users can employ Clearvale for collaborating within an organization. Clearvale users typically meet via the platform, share ideas and develop content.

Communities, Customers

SugarCRM Vice President of Business Development, Chuck Coulson, said in a statement that the integration of the two platforms "helps organizations uncover untapped sources of expertise for improved customer service," as well as reducing the time needed to solve business problems. He added that the combined platforms allow SugarCRM users to utilize social connections within an entire organization, alongside their customer management capabilities.

The companies gave several potential use cases that could benefit from the integration. SugarCRM users, for instance, might develop a "sales deal room" where a team can discuss progress with certain accounts, or they might create a community online where product teams can utilize feedback from SugarCRM to plan product updates.

The alliance points to the growing commonalities between collaborative business networking, social business and customer relationship management.

SugarCRM Grows More Collaborative

This is becoming particularly true as CRM systems add even more functionality for social media communications/analysis involving customers and with internal company experts, such as Kana has been doing. Broadvision, in fact, promotes Clearvale as a community-building social network for businesses to engage with colleagues, partners -- and customers. SugarCRM said in July of last year that it was taking a larger role in the OpenSocial Foundation, which works towards standards for social business applications.